WSJ.com Partners with Loomia to Provide Article Recommendation Engine

While many are arguing that The Wall Street Journal didn't get the Blogging history article correct, i have been busy playing around with the new article recommendations feature that is now available on WSJ.com.

WSJ has partnered with Loomia a recommendations engine whose hope for media companies is to guide users to content on their site that they might never have seen otherwise. I think it is a very useful feature and have always been a fan of content produced by other readers actions- what i call User Generated Data- such as most e-mailed, most read, most traded (stocks), most blogged etc.. WSJ also recently released features using Sphere to present related articles and blogs.

It is great to see WSJ.com implement these types of tools because as with most consumer focused new media tools, my clients in the enterprise space are also starting to talk about providing similar functionality in regards to creating a 'wisdom of crowds' type of sharing around news content.

Read the What's This description in the screen shot i provide to understand a bit about how the recommendation's engine works.

Loomia also comes with clickstream monitoring which is obviously of use above and beyond proactively serving up content- for example it can continue to provide metrics and user behaviors around the type of content readers like and authors should be writing.

What are we going to see on WSJ.com next- a MyBlogLog widget?

Monday's edition will also have a Twitter article. I am not sure if this WSJ twitter channel belongs to WSJ.com but is doesn't seem to be updating, Marketwatch another Dow Jones property has a twitter channel but it doesn't have that many followers (i know that one is 'owned' by Marketwatch). I took a look at other twitter URLs like twitter.com/bbc, twitter.com/reuters, twitter.com/nyt (which belongs to Dave Weiner) etc. and they all have very few followers as well. I personally like my Marketwatch twitter alerts.